Skewed sex ratios: a long-run trend

As early as 1990, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen drew international attention to India’s “missing women”: the millions of girls that should have been born or should have grown up into women, if it weren’t for India’s strong preference for sons. Instead, they were aborted as fetuses, neglected as children or purposefully killed.

As a result, there are only about 940 women for every 1,000 men on average in India, a number that has been relatively stable over time. Yet a closer look reveals considerable variation across the country’s 28 states.

Goa and Mizoram, for example, used to top the list of states: They counted more women than men for the first half of the 20th century, but the sex ratio there dropped drastically after the 1950s. Kerala, on the other hand, has slowly worked its way up and has been the state with the highest sex ratio since the 1970s.

Regional disparities

The conventional wisdom has it that way more women are missing in the North of India than there are in the South or the North-East, and state-level aggregate data would support that view at first glance.

But digging deeper and examining district-level sex ratios instead shows that there are no uniform patterns across the country: Even in the North, some districits fare quite well, while there are enough districts in the South that have alarmingly few women.

Even among the country’s biggest cities variation is huge. Some sport quite even sex ratios, while others skew highly male (and few female). Here are the best and worst performers.

What Factors Affect Skewed Sex Ratios?

Reserchers attribute the strong son preference in India to both cultural and economic reasons.

Cultural Factors

In both Hinduism and Islam, the main religions in India, sons – particularly first-born sons – occupy a special place for families. The data does bear out a correlation between religion and sex ratio.

The table disaggregates states by religous community and the ratio of women to men within that community and location. Browse to explore differences across states.

Economic Factors

Anecdotally, strong son preference to the extent of sex-selective abortions, child neglect or dowry deaths are also incidents most frequently encountered among less educated or poorer people. This bias, so the story goes, disappears as people become more educated and wealthier. Yet the correlation between the sex ratio and literacy and poverty, respectively, is not as clear as we might expect.

This fact becomes even more clear when comparing the relationship between the sex ratio and literacy rate over time: Indian states have become drastically more literate, but the sex ratio has stagnated, or in some cases even worsened, over the past 60 years.

Missing Women Around the Globe

While the stark male surplus in both India and China, the world’s most populous countries, have sparked concerns about women’s rights and safetly, the risk of conflict and increased crime, and future demographic problems, a look at the map the phenomenon of uneven sex ratios is not unique to these two places, or to Asia in general.

Data Sources

2011 Census data: Ministry of Home Affairs, India Historic sex ratio, historic literacy, poverty, cities: Indiastat Global sex ratio: